Stockholm's Archipelago and Strindberg's

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modernity.

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The archipelago appears within a historical frame – the first part of 

the sixteenth century – also in the short story ‘En ovälkommen’ (An 

Unwelcome Man), published in the series Svenska öden och äventyr 

(Swedish Destinies and Adventures) in 1882.

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 In the story of Kristian, 

who loathes social rules and prefers a wild life fishing and hunting 

in the outer skerries by the open sea, we find, conveyed by spatial 

relations, an opposition of world models that is typical of Strindberg’s 

anarchistic tendencies during the early Eighties, whereby society 

corresponds to lies and falsehood (Edqvist 1961: 198-201).

The archipelago plays a relevant part in the section ‘Högsommar‘ 

(High Summer) of Dikter på vers och prosa (Poems in Verse and Prose), 

Strindberg’s first collection of poetry from 1883.

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 The prose and verse 

poem ‘Solrök’ (Heat Haze) (SV XV: 77-86) is interesting also from the 

stylistic point of view, as the protagonist’s story is conveyed by an 

interior monologue in the third person, a form of ‘Erlebte Rede’. He 

and his family are initially on a steamboat, together with a crowd of 

Stockholmers going from town to the islands on a summer day (SV 

XV: 77-78). These people are excited and expecting a regeneration 

in nature; the protagonist observes them with detachment, but he is 

after all a part of that same collective movement from the civilized to 

the natural space. In the last section of the poem (SV XV: 83-86), a trip 

to a virgin island is described. The protagonist is now alone; he needs 

loneliness and wants to reach as far as possible from the crowd. The 

unmasking of his dream of regeneration occurs when he sees human 

traces on the island (Kylhammar 1985: 43-45). A feldspar cave was 

there; now it has been abandoned, leaving devastation behind. It is 

common to find veins of feldspar, a more recent kind of rock, in the 

primary bedrock. Feldspar became important in the eighteenth and 

nineteenth century for the industrial production of pottery, and even 

the archipelago was exploited for the purpose (Hedenstierna 2000a: 

17-18). In ‘Solrök’, where the author’s perspective is inspired by 

Rousseau, the protagonist draws the conclusion that he cannot escape 

civilization, as human traces, even one’s own, are everywhere, and 

unspoiled nature is an illusion. What finally saves him from pessimism 

is the view of his wife in a white summer dress with their child in a pram 

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under the oak trees. In spite of the latent tensions behind the apparent 

harmony, expressed in the poem ‘Lördagskväll’ (Saturday Evening) 

(SV XV: 96), summer family life on the island appears as a form of 

paradise in Dikter. In another poem, ‘Morgon’ (Morning) (SV XV: 97-

98), Strindberg depicts what Roland Barthes has defined the modern 

myth of the writer on vacation in a natural environment, which helps 

him to find concentration and produce more (Barthes 1957: 29-32). 

The poem shows how the protagonist, a loving father and husband, 

but above all a writer, has an intellectual social function that inevitably 

links him to urban activities, projects and habits, although he is in the 

silent wilderness.

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 Strindberg’s skrivarstuga on Kymmendö, the hut 

where he wrote in front of the sea, is a symbol of this myth. 

Strindberg would never see Kymmendö again after summer 1883, 

but for some years he hoped that he might go there again. The 

nostalgic feeling makes the archipelago appear suddenly, as a vision, 

while the writer is living abroad. It happens in the sequence ‘Fjärde 

Natten’ (The Fourth Night) of the long poem Sömngångarnätter på 

vakna dagar (Sleepwalking Nights in Broad Daylight) from 1884, when 

the constricted and falsified nature in Bois de Boulogne, embodied by 

a small spruce fir that the protagonist sees there, arouses memories 

of Swedish summer and its Nordic nature (SV XV: 206-207).

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 This 

contemporary presence of real and imagined space determines the 

structure of Sömngångarnätter (thus shortened), with its interaction 

between Paris and Stockholm, civilization and nature.

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 The final vision 

of ‘Fjärde Natten’, again inspired by Rousseau, consists of a new ice 

age, by which civilization – with its excesses, privileges, establishments 

and rules – is swept away, and after which a mythical rebirth takes 

place (Ciaravolo 2012b: 181-182). The images of glaciation and post-

glacial natural rebirth create associations to the archipelago (SV XV: 

219-220). 

A similar nostalgic vision is described in the series of articles Från 

det vaknande Italien. Sommarbrev i mars

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 (From the Awakening 

Italy. Summer Letters in March), when the writer is watching the 

Mediterranean sea near Genova at sunrise in March 1884 (SV XVIII: 

81-82). The tendency of this reportage is to observe Italy from the 

point of view of a fault finder, in order to question its romantic myth 

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(Ciaravolo 2012c); and even when things are beautiful, as in front 

of the Mediterranean sea, the subjective reporter finds something 

lacking, for example some islands and skerries scattered in the gulf, 

to fill its emptiness: ‘[…] not islands with oranges, laurel trees and 

marble palaces, but small rough gneiss hillocks with thorny spruce firs 

and red cottages’.

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 Strindberg’s identification with a landscape can 

even be expressed in such peripheral annotations.

In Western culture the classical and Christian traditions join, through 

the Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance, in search of an earthly 

paradise, and the conjectures about the existence of paradisiac islands 

were frequent.

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 These traditions, describing a state of harmony among 

human beings and in the whole creation, acquired a political meaning 

in the Renaissance, when the myths of Atlantis and of the Fortunate 

Isles were welded into new utopian visions of society. Thomas More’s, 

Tommaso Campanella’s and Francis Bacon’s utopias all take place on 

islands.

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 Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature is, according to 

Delumeau, part of this cultural heritage (Delumeau 1992: 297).

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Some traces can also be found in Strindberg’s utopian essays in 

Likt och Olikt

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 (A Bit of Everything) from 1884. In ‘Om det Allmänna 

Missnöjet, dess Orsaker och Botemedel’ (SV XVII: 9-83) (On the 

General Discontent, Its Causes and Cures) the proposed solution of 

the social issue can be summarized in a return to self-sufficient rural 

villages, simpler living conditions and less demand for comforts and 

consumption (Ciaravolo 2012c: 275-279). These ideas are based, as 

the author reports, on his concrete experience of the rural and pastoral 

Kymmendö, where the population typically combines agriculture, 

fishing and hunting (SV XVII: 69

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). In the same essay Strindberg 

condemns the polluting steamboats (SV XVII: 66), i.e. the means of 

transportation which actually allow his moving back-and-forth between 

Stockholm and the islands. Here the writer seems to be more consistent 

with his utopia than with his life experience. 

Strindberg’s depiction of marital conflicts finds one of its settings 

in the archipelago. In Dikter the family is for the poet, as we have 

seen, an anchor against pessimism. The short story ‘Ett dockhem’

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(A Doll’s House) in the collection Giftas I (Getting Married I) – a story 

and a collection that in many respect will determine a turning point 

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